Comic-Con!

This weekend was one of the events I look forward to all year — Comic-Con in San Diego. Anyone who knows me knows I love comic books. Comic-Con has changed a lot since I started coming a few years ago. Increasing popularity of blockbuster franchise properties has brought hordes of attendees who come more for Twilight/Lost/Whatever than for comics. It's cool that it exposes more people to comics, but it's really annoying that they clog up the convention center and sell out the show (150,000+ people over four days) months in advance. My favorite part of Comic-Con is meeting the writers and artists who created the books I love and having them sign my comics. This year was a real treat. Seen below is the legendary Gene Colan holding my newly signed copy of Iron Man #1! The man is 82 years old, and he's been drawing comics since the 1940s. He was actually really surprised I knew who he was! I also met a bunch of other awesome folks, got some sketches, and can't wait for next year. Maybe I'll even have some money by then.

Hebron, Merit of our Fathers

The tour I booked to Hebron was set to leave at 9:15 from the Sheraton in central Jerusalem. I tremped into town, but unbeknownst to me, my ride would end far south of where I needed to end up. A local bus took me where I needed to go, but my plan of getting a free ride in backfired when I only saved one shekel by taking the local bus over the bus from Alon Shvut.

Anyhow, the tour bus took us first to Rachel’s tomb in Bethlehem, except you wouldn’t know it to be there. Bethlehem is an Arab city and between violent attacks and peace accords, the place was set to be closed to Jews. But, as our clearly religious-right tour guide retold, enough Jews made a fuss and braved the dangerous territory to visit that the government preserved the site for future generations of Jews. This meant that the Wall would have to be designed in such a way as to allow access from Israeli controlled territory, so a narrow finger was built that extended to the site. We drove down this corridor, surrounded on both sides by tall gray concrete walls, until we reached the building. The tomb used to be a small building in the middle of a larger lot, but after Joseph’s tomb was desecrated by Palestinian rioters, this large structure was built around it to protect and preserve it.

From here the bus drove to Hebron, but the tour guide got off the bus halfway there and said we would be met in Hebron by another tour guide. We drove along through places unknown to us, one man commenting that only in Israel would we be on a tour without a guide. After meeting our new guide, a Jewish resident of Hebron, we stopped in various places where he told us of the history and importance of the community here. Walking through a small museum in the Beit Hadassah building, which featured a moving display on the 1929 massacre, he recounted tales of Jewish valor and heroism, and of the hardships suffered by the Jews who wanted to be so close to this holy place. Without diminishing the real efforts of Jews to maintain this part of their heritage, I can’t omit that the tour was heavy on inspiration and light on facts. I like tours where the guide tells a sweeping narrative of a place from ancient times to present day, but we only heard bits and pieces.

Hebron itself was a ghost town. Very few people—Jew or Arab—walked the streets. Here and there were a hasid or Arab kids on a donkey. The kosher restaurant, which wasn’t so good, blasted Chanukah music as a form of audio assault on the city, across from the only three Arab shops open. I looked around, watched one hand-mold dozens of small cups on his clay wheel, and chatted with another shopkeeper who thanked me for even stopping to talk. Walking into the Ma’arat Hamachpelah, or the Cave of the Patriarchs, the traditional burial place of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah, and possibly others, I was caught off guard by Jews praying under Arabic script. This was converted to a mosque centuries ago, the Ibrahimi Mosque after their patriarch as well, and now arks with torah scrolls and Hebrew biblical passages sit in rooms covered in clashing religious décor. Cenotaphs honoring Abraham, Sarah, Jacob, and Leah are situated among small prayer rooms, while Isaac and Leah’s are in the Muslim side of the building, which Jews only have access to ten days out of the year. The whole complex used to be open to all, until American-Israeli Baruch Goldstein opened fire on worshiping Muslims in 1994, killing 29, and a gate now separates the Muslim side from the Jewish side, with neither allowed on the other’s turf.

By the end of the day I had visited the graves of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs, the holiest places in Judaism after the Temple Mount. I saw the yearning of Jews to be in this place, and heard of the courageous acts they performed to be here. But I also saw a nation divided, justified or not, and the home of our forefathers resigned to rot. We drove through the well-kept Kiryat Arba on the way out, contrasting sharply with the decrepitude of the Hebron streets. I pass no judgment, but I do hope to get an alternate story on a Palestinian tour later this week.

Touring in Stereo

Tomorrow I go on what will be the first of two official tours of Bethlehem and Hebron. Visiting these places and seeing the historical sites and the current situation for myself was a priority of mine when I came here. This was complicated by the hullabaloo over Beit Shalom (a house in the Arab outskirts of Hebron that was bought by an American Jew for Israeli Jews to live in, and because no one takes the idea of residential heterogeneity particularly well here, the Arabs got upset back in late October, the government agreed and told the Jews to leave, the Jews rioted, hilarity ensued, or something to that extent). Now that my time here is running low, I finally made plans to do it. I wanted to find a non-political trip so I wouldn’t be bombarded with whatever propaganda. No such luck. There are no non-political trips. Each has is its own unassailable agenda. Then I had an idea: I will take two tours and get both an education in the history of the region and of the perspectives of the respective groups. Tomorrow I take the right-wing Jewish tour and Thursday is the Palestinian tour, with still-in-flux Christmas plans Wednesday in between.

On the Way Down South

Tomorrow I have a tour booked of Petra. All tours to Petra leave from Eilat, so I took the 4.5 hour bus from Jerusalem to Eilat where I would spend the night. Alone, after various people bailed on me. After a close call (I left my passport in the bag I had left in Emek Refaim and made a few frantic phone calls to have someone take a cab to the bus station and bring it to me) I was on my way, east toward Jericho, south along the Dead Sea, past Ein Gedi and Masada, through desolate desert expanses, to Israel’s prized coastal resort. Which was pretty dinky and kind of a letdown. I checked into my hostel, thankfully the least sketchy looking of the bunch, and commenced my romantic day with myself. I explored the city with myself as my guide. Put my feet in the cool waters of the Red Sea and gazed at the boats bobbing on the cerulean waters and watched the sun set over the mountains of Jordan. I wandered by myself through the promenade, pointed out to myself the interesting people I saw. I marveled to myself at the Muslim girls riding the bungee swing in their hijabs on their Muslim holiday. I took myself out to a delicious steak dinner (across from a Muslim family eating opposite a portrait of the Lubavitcher Rebbe) and then out to a movie. Getting late, I walked myself back to the hostel and prepared for my big day in Petra.

Mount of Olives and Jesus' last days

Going back in time to the day before Jesus’ last, I went to explore the Mount of Olives. Walking the same route as yesterday, I visited the Church of St. Peter in Gallicantu, named for Peter’s rejection of Jesus and his later repentance. The main sanctuary has lovely pastel mosaics in an art nouveau style. Caves on a lower level are believed to be a possible location of Christ’s prison, and an ancient stairway along the side of the church, possibly the path Jesus took down to Gethsemane on the other side of the Kidron Valley that night. Walking along the Eastern Wall, I could see the various churches on the Mount of Olives, to their right the historic Jewish cemetery, and beyond that the town of Silwan.

I descended into the valley and investigated the monumental tombs at the base of the mount. These tombs, traditionally identified as the tombs of Avshalom, Zechariah, and Jehoshaphat—and a fourth marked as the tombs of the sons of the priests—were carved out of the very rock of the mountain. I meandered through the thousands of Jewish graves, some new, some ancient, cracked, and worn to oblivion. The churches were closed for siesta, so I trekked up and up to the top of the mount by the Seven Arches Hotel with its spectacular views of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount. I tried to follow a church spire but got disinterested and stopped partway at the Pater Noster church, close to where Jesus related the Lord’s Prayer to his disciples. The walls of the church, cloisters, and courtyard are covered with translations of the prayer in more languages than I knew were spoken by Christians, everything from Cornish to Tagalog to Hmong and beyond.

On the descent down the mount, a small residential complex also includes an underground complex of tombs, believed to be the burial place of Malachi. I ran into some Americans in the blackness and searched the tunnels with them. Farther down is the Dominus Flevit Church, where Jesus wept for the destruction of Jerusalem. A window at the front of the chapel looks across onto the Temple Mount. The grounds also include ossuaries of the type used at the time. Sadly, the Church of Mary Magdalene, with its gilded onion domes, is only open to visitors for two hours once a week.

At the foot of the mountain is the Church of All Nations, built on the site of two older churches, which sits next to the Garden of Gethsemane. “Gethsemane,” derived from the Aramaic for “olive press,” is where Jesus and his disciples gathered the night before his death. A small olive grove stands there today, and a very forward young Arab man with surprisingly good English offered to show me through, until I mentioned that I was not willing to pay him. The church façade’s stunning mosaic, the colossal marble columns in the interior, and the ornate architecture were the most awe-inspiring I’d seen the whole day. But for all their beauty, I was still surprised that all of these churches were less than two hundred years old. Their locations were historic, but the actual structures less so.

Just outside the garden is the tomb of the Virgin Mary, an Orthodox crypt cut out of the ground, and housing the sarcophagus in a small shrine. As an Orthodox site, the dimly lit space, heavy with smoky incense, profuse with lamps and mismatched art, stood in stark contrast to the elegant, carefully crafted Western spaces I had visited earlier. The father wished me well in very broken English, then I headed back to Emek Refaim, where, in one of the odder sights of the day, saw frummies on Segways. Miracles never cease.

In the footsteps of Jesus

This post is really long and I have way too many photos to post. I'm considering adding them all to a photo site instead of bloating this entry even more. Suggestions are welcome.

I’ve had a fascination with Christian imagery for as long as I can remember. It’s an epic story of good and evil, told and retold in pictures by different people in different times, each giving their own vision to the greater fabric of legend. Years of art history and travels to museums and churches abroad fostered this love of Christian art and thinking, and I was thrilled with the opportunity to see the places recounted with my own eyes. The Via Dolorosa, the route that Jesus walked on his last day, is memorialized as a pilgrimage with 14 Stations of the Cross, tracing his journey through suffering to salvation.

I began walking along the southern wall of the Old City, at times along the ramparts built by Suleiman, and along the eastern wall of the Temple Mount. This side is not seen by most Jewish tourists, though the walk around the southern and eastern sides affords views of the Hulda Gates on the south, the original entrances to the Temple, and the Golden Gate, the gate through which, according to Jewish tradition, the Messiah will enter Jerusalem. Opposite the Temple Mount is the Kidron Valley, and beyond that the Mount of Olives, which also features prominently in the life of Jesus. The Church of St. Peter in Gallicantu being closed on Sundays, I walk along the Muslim cemetery that flanks the Eastern Wall and through the Lions’ Gate to the Muslim Quarter, past the ridiculous traffic caused by a truck trying to go in and a van trying to go out. The first thing I see is a small market in the plaza selling everything from nuts to knock-off Barbies and cologne. Farther down a wall has engravings illustrating the 14 Stations.

1. Jesus is condemned to death

The tour traditionally begins in the plaza of a girls’ school, but unless you take the tour along with the monks on Friday afternoons, this spot, where Pontius Pilate sentences Jesus, is closed to the public.

2. Jesus takes the cross

A complex built here includes the Chapel of Condemnation and the thorn-themed Chapel of the Flagellation. On the floor of the Chapel of Condemnation is some of the original Roman pavement with games carved into it. This is reputed to be the Lithostratos, where the Roman soldiers gambled for Jesus’ clothes. Father down the road is what’s visible of the Ecce Homo Arch where Pilate declared, “This is the man.” Under the church built on the site is a network of rooms and cisterns in use at the time of Jesus. Past the arch is a chapel marking one possible site of Jesus’ prison. Groups of Jews in black hats and coats mill about the shops, crowded among throngs of Arabs shopping in the market. I make a small detour out the Damascus gate for a look at East Jerusalem, where markers of Israeli nationalism and Arab culture butt against each other.

3. Jesus falls for the first time

A small chapel was built here by the Free Polish Army in the 1940s. Beautiful though modern chapels along this route and in Jerusalem in general seem to be common; this was unexpected, as I was hoping for something more ancient. A nearly toothless man named Walid decides that he will be my tour guide and brings me downstairs.

4. Jesus meets his mother

A mosaic on the floor shows footprints of where Mary may have stood. Walid then takes me through an unmarked door on the street to the Austrian Hostel, and to the views of the area from the roof. Realizing I may not finish before dark if I don’t hurry, I plead with Walid that I can do the rest on my own and thank him for his trouble. On the street is another marker of the meeting of Jesus and Mary, though I don’t know if it’s above the chapel below or a differing tradition. Traditions, I find, differ greatly on the locations specified in the 14 stations.

5. Simon takes the cross

Whatever is here to mark where Simon of Cerene took the cross from the ailing Jesus is closed. I keep walking.

6. Veronica wipes Jesus’ face

Story goes that St. Veronica wiped Jesus’ face with a handkerchief and the impression of Jesus’ face was imprinted on the cloth. Known as the Sudarium, it is in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Whatever is here to mark the spot and the home of Veronica is also closed.

7. Jesus falls a second time

This is in the middle of a packed marketplace set up in the narrow streets. Butchers, barbershops, restaurants, and shops selling shoes, antiquities, and pirated movies line the passage. Some guy is blocking the door to the chapel with his stand. No respect.

8. Jesus speaks to the women of Jerusalem

A marker on the wall points to the spot.

9. Jesus falls a third time

I wander through the Coptic monastery at the leisure of some old monk, before getting kicked out by a younger one. Down below a Coptic chapel is Helen’s cistern, allegedly found by St. Helen, mother of Constantine. The acoustics are incredible, and a woman sings a hymn as per the guidebook’s advice, the notes rising and echoing across time. A number of Ethiopian Coptic monks live in tiny shacks on the platform before the entrance to the Holy Sepulchre plaza. They’ve been here for a while, though changing allegiances and feuds between Israel, Egypt, and Ethiopia have kept more of their fellows away. Through an Ethiopian Coptic chapel is the plaza before the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Stations 10 to 14 are inside.

10. Jesus is stripped of his clothes

A small side chapel viewable through a window marks the event. Walking into the church and up the stairs to the station, the huge diversity of Christian traditions is very apparent. Ancient Byzantine architecture is flecked with Orthodox excessiveness, Catholic elegance, and chapels from diverse groups over the ages.

11. Jesus is nailed to the cross

An altar adorned with silver plates donated by the Medicis sits below a mosaic of the scene in this Catholic chapel. A woman reaches up to touch the wounds on the mosaic, as if the mosaic itself was a holy relic.

12. Jesus dies on the cross

Lanterns hang by the dozens over the Orthodox chapel. Figures of Jesus, bloody and in pain, doting Mary, and doting Mary, stand before an ornate silver wall of reliefs. It borders on gaudy, and exists in stark contrast to the more restrained chapel to its right. This is the climax of the pilgrimage. The emotion is palpable. Women dab at their tears. A line forms to touch the rock of Calvary through a disk under the altar. The mood is only broken by a noisy Israeli tour guide and his boisterous group. I tag along and follow them downstairs to the Chapel of Adam with the Rock of Golgotha, cracked by divine earthquake, Adam having many parallels to Jesus in Christian thought. After waiting for one of the various services to pass, I walk back upstairs.

13. Jesus is deposed from the cross

Nestled between stations 11 and 12 is a small shrine of the Stabat Mater, or Virgin Mary as Our Lady of Sorrows. Down below in the entry to the church is the Stone of the Anointing where Jesus’ body was prepared for burial. Pilgrims kneel to pray and bring their heads to rest on the red rock.

14. Jesus is laid in his tomb

In the center of the rotunda is the holy sepulcher itself, the Aedicule, the tomb of Christ. Held in place by steel girders since an earthquake decades ago, cracks and seams bulge with notes left by pilgrims, much like the Western Wall. I can’t bring myself to duck (translation: bow) and go inside the chapel, so I watch the service from outside. I explore the many chapels around the church and then find my way back through the Christian Quarter and back to the German Colony. My feet ache and my entire being is exhausted. Despite not having a personal religious connection to Jesus, I felt the sorrow and salvation. The journey has touched my spirit and I think I have gained a new understanding of the human condition. Congratulations on getting this far. Now we both sleep.

Veneration City

This morning I went to a bat mitzvah by the southern end of the Western Wall. What is today known as the Western Wall is an exposed part of the Temple Mount’s retaining wall built by Herod and used as a place of prayer by Jews who wish to pray as close as possible to the site of the Holy of Holies. While compelling, the place does lack a certain decorum, and the large crowds and separate prayer areas for men and women make it difficult to have family events there. Over the last few decades since the Old City came under Israeli control in 1967, archaeologists have excavated much of the area around the south-western corner of the Temple Mount, exposing the street from the Second Temple period, along with shops, ritual baths, and other structures that had been covered by thirty feet of earth for centuries. This area is now frequently used for small events because of its proximity to the site of the Temple, as well as its relative tranquility. We were the first of at least three private services there that day. This bat mitzvah was celebrated in a more egalitarian style with the bat mitzvah girl leading part of the service and reading from the Torah, which would be impossible at the Western Wall. And praying alongside the mounds of debris, the stones piled where they were toppled by the Romans when they destroyed the Temple two thousand years ago, was a much more powerful reminder of the losses and triumphs of the Jewish people than the Western Wall plaza could convey.

The southern end of the Western Wall and the Jerusalem Archaeological Park. At the top left is what remains of Robinson’s Arch, once an entrance to the upper level of the Temple Mount and the largest arch in the Roman Empire in its day. In the foreground are the stones that once made up the top of the wall before the Temple’s destruction. They rest on the original pavement, part of which is visible above the rocks. Beyond that are three enclosures which were shops, including one of a money changer, where travelers would come to buy sacrifices to bring to the Temple, ritual baths, and other buildings of the era. In the distance is the southern wall of the Old City.

En route to meet a friend for lunch, I went to the Abbey of the Dormition, a beautiful church on the site of the Virgin Mary’s Assumption to heaven (some Christian tradition tells that she did not die but fell asleep and was received by Christ in heaven, hence Dormition). I marveled at the striking Byzantine mosaics and stonework, and only found out later that the reason it’s in such good condition is that it’s only 100 years old, built on the site of an older Byzantine church.

The crypt of the church with a wood and ivory statue marking the spot where Mary fell asleep and passed to eternity.

From there I walked to a building containing three religions’ holy sites. The ground floor features a small synagogue at the site of what some hold is the tomb of Kind David. The entry was packed with people singing and dancing, the songs and drums echoing into the courtyard. The Upper Room on the second floor is venerated as the Cenacle, the site of Jesus’ Last Supper. Arabic writing and a mihrab date to when Muslims took over the building in the sixteenth century and made it a mosque, holy to Muslims who also revere the man they know as Nabi Da'ud. The solemnity of the Upper Room contrasted starkly with the exuberance downstairs. From the roof I had a great view of the church and the surrounding area. Then to koobeh lunch with a friend in the shuk and back to Baka for Shabbat.

The cramped room with the covered entry to the supposed tomb of Kind David, which the Bible says isn't here.

Thankful

I love Thanksgiving. I’m proud of my American heritage, and I’ll take any excuse to eat and party. I wasn’t going to let being in a foreign country stop me from celebrating. After my and a friend’s respective dinners were moved to Friday, we decided to go to a pot-luck dinner at the Merkaz Hamagshimim, a kind of cultural center for Americans in Israel. She got into a bit of a predicament with an Arab cab driver who was saying inappropriate things to her and then followed her to the dinner, but putting that behind us, we showed up to the packed dinner an hour and a half late. Sitting on the stage with the picked-over scraps of turkey we could salvage, we talked about family and friends and misadventures and the things we were thankful for. I’m thankful for my friends and family and the time I spend with them. I’m thankful I’m in a position where I could quit my job and take some time off without worry. I’m thankful for the opportunity to see new things and go to new places. I’m thankful for my safety and that of the people I care about in a volatile world.

The West Bank in Pictures

This morning I took a local bus to the Be’er Sheva bus depot, then the bus up through the West Bank back to Alon Shvut. I learned that the reason the buses that go through the Territories are so much cheaper than the buses that go around (14 shekel versus 29 shekel) is that they are half-price to encourage Israelis to take them. After the Intifada, a large portion of Israelis are still too scared to go through the West Bank. The windows on the bullet-proof bus were the best I had yet. Here are photos of my journey.

The Be’er Sheva bus station, full of soldiers on their way somewhere, and other assorted commotion.

People here pack a lot of heat. I'm still not completely used to seeing it.

Most of the West Bank looks like this. Scrub, scattered fields, sheep.

The entry gate at Otniel with the Otniel Yeshiva on the hilltop.

People getting on at the Otniel stop. The greenery and Western architecture set it apart from the Arab towns.

An aerial view of the Otniel area, courtesy of Google. Notice the American suburb-style layout of Otniel on the right, with small rows of white trailers directly north and downhill of the yeshiva. The town is only accessable from a single road with a security gate. The cluster of white buildings on the northern arc of that road is an army base. On the left is an Arab town, built along the road and without the same kind of meticulous organization.

View of what I think is greater Hebron from inside the gate of Haggai.

My final destination: barricade with soldier, and guy not waiting behind it.

Storytime

In Israel, everyone has a story. Ask someone anywhere else where they are from and what they are doing there and you could get an interesting personal history, or you could get something as simple as “I’m from Boston.” But here, those questions aren’t just ice-breakers; they are a window into each person’s life. For each person who came to Israel, their reasons and their stories give an insight into their personalities and dreams that would not ordinarily come so soon after introductions. And for each person who was born here, that question immediately unloads an oral tradition full of drama and hope.

For dinner we went to one of the deans of the med program at Ben Gurion who had come to Be’er Sheva 37 years ago to start the program. At the time, Be’er Sheva was a small desert town with a small new university and a lot of ancient history. He started the minyan at the absorption center when they moved there, which on Friday night had old Jews from Morocco, Uruguay, and Yemen, and teenagers fresh from Ethiopia. He watched Be’er Sheva and its university grow into a bustling metropolis and a thriving educational center, watched as new neighborhoods sprung up from the empty fields, watched as a new generation of Israelis made the city their own. We went to friends for lunch, each of them too with a tale of searching and finding something here, or of exploring the world, or grandparents’ escape from Europe. Whether seventh generation Jerusalemite or here for two weeks, each person adds to the greater story of Israel.

As a new city, and one in the desert, it was comforting to be in Be’er Sheva, with its cars and broad boulevards and desert air. It reminded me of Anaheim or Sherman Oaks in a way. It was nice to be back in civilization, and Be’er Sheva being a more secular city, I found the cars driving on Shabbat—noticeably absent in Alon Shvut or anywhere else I’ve spent Shabbat so far—oddly normal. Somehow Shabbat seems more different from the rest of the week when I’m the one walking than when everyone else is too.

Two street signs on opposite crosswalks. Clearly they still have a ways to go.

Every Day I Have the Blues

At 11:30 last night, my friend in Be’er Sheva emailed me, asking if I wanted to come down for Shabbat. My cousin’s wife looked on Eged’s nearly useless website and saw that there was a bus leaving Jerusalem at 9:30 this morning. I packed my things, got up early, and made it to the bus station at 9:45 with time to spare before the bus was set to arrive. I waited. Two cars came by and rolled down their windows to ask if I was going to Kiryat Arba. This is not unusual for Israel, as it is common to tremp when one needs to get somewhere; tremp, from the German tramp, i.e. to be taken for a ride. But Be’er Sheva is a ways past Kiryat Arba, so I declined the rides and waited, not knowing that there were buses from Kiryat Arba to Be’er Sheva because the website doesn’t list connections or have a map of the system.

Not my stop, but a good example of why I hate the bus system. Can you tell what bus stops here?

I rested on the edge of the barricade as the soldiers paced behind me. A checkpoint near here was declared “an obstacle to peace,” and yet when it was dismantled peace did not come and people were killed. A few years ago, some kids were run down here while waiting for a ride. A pile of stones marks the spot, and a concrete barrier and armed soldiers protect the bus stop, though everyone waited for their rides 15 feet or so down from the protection of waist-high cement. An army lookout sits on the mound on the other side of the highway and the soldiers remain. People and buses came and went, but not my bus. By 10:20 I was getting anxious. I called the house and apparently the website now said the bus was not running today. Instead, I crossed the street to catch a bus to Jerusalem to get a bus from there to Be’er Sheva.

Soldiers guarding the bus stop, which is behind me, protected by a barricade. A monument on the left, and people waiting on the right not by the bus stop for a bus or a tremp, whichever comes first.

The bus, with the clearest windows of any bus I’d been on so far in the Territories, and with a clear view of the ultimate Barrier on the hillside, took us to the train station on the outskirts of Jerusalem where we switched to a non-bullet-proof local bus, and went from there to the central bus station, passing walls of Tzipi Livni billboards and one for a noodle house on the way, up in advance of the forthcoming national elections. I grabbed some Chinese food from a stand in the food court, where the girl told me I was wasting money getting the small instead of the large box because the large was only 5 shekel more, despite me not being that hungry. Also randomly in the bus stop was my brother and a bunch of kids from his yeshiva on their way down to Hebron for Shabbat, this week being the week Jews read of Abraham’s purchase of the Cave of the Patriarchs, in which he would bury his wife Sarah. I do intend to go down there, but I’d prefer to go at a time that is not a romanticized mob scene.

In the central bus station in Jerusalem. Notice the man praying in the candy store by the liquor.

On the bus south to Be’er Sheva, this time on the “right” side of the Green Line, the name rang true. Fields of green dotted with sparkling white homes on rolling hilltops under open skies. Highway overpasses and train tracks and power lines and crop dusters—it was hard not forgetting I was in Israel and not central California or the Midwest. Green became tan as the desert took over, clouds drifting gently along. Count Basie played and sang me the whole way down, trumpets clamoring and piano keys tinkling along roads of majesty.

Heading east.

The Negev.

Of Friends and Fueds

My cousin’s wife had a driving lesson today and I got a ride with her into Jerusalem. Annoyingly, there is no concept of a learner’s permit here, so there is no way to practice driving in advance of the driver’s test outside of lessons. We drove around, practiced parking, and the instructor, who spent a bunch of time on the phone, told me that I needed to speak only Hebrew in Israel. While waiting for a college friend to get out of class, I sketched in my sketchbook for the first time in years. It took me a while to get into it, slowly remembering the process of drawing. We had lunch at “Kuppah Gh’oh” and then walked around the scenic HUC campus where all HUC rabbinical students from the various campuses in the US spend their first year. She told me about the wall built with narrow windows to minimize exposure to then-neighboring Jordanian shooters. Now squarely in Israel, the campus was an oasis of calm in the bustling city.

View of the Old City walls and the Tower of David from HUC.

I walked around a bit after she left for class, finding myself on front of what will be the Waldorf=Astoria Palace. The designers of the building appreciated the old façade so much they gutted the building and are constructing the new one inside it. Across the street I sat down in the park to check my map and call friends. Among the trash, graffiti, and the odd man peeing, I saw what looked like old grave stones with Arabic writing, now cracked and broken. This was a Muslim cemetery, long since deconsecrated, and under auspices of the Muslim Waqf who clearly didn’t take such great care of it. It is this same cemetery that is now the center of controversy because of plans by the Simon Wiesenthal center to build part of a new Museum of Tolerance here. Without taking sides, I’d hazard that they might take better care of it.

Construction on the new hotel, built in the shell of a hotel built by the Ottomans—on cemetery grounds.

The Mamilla cemetary as it is now. The trash, graffiti, and neglect are just outside the frame.

I walked down to Emek Refaim to meet friend #2 who I just discovered lived there. He had also given up a job in a thriving economy to come here and now is gainfully unemployed. Passing time until meeting friend #3 for dinner, I stopped by the PresenTense office, where I overheard someone lament that they’d prefer to eat free-range eggs, but most free-range eggs come from the Territories, and it was a tough call for him because he didn’t support that either. Upon relating this to Micah, he pointed out the irony that the farmers in the Territories were more humanitarian. At dinner at New Deli we caught each other up on what our high school classmates were up to. Friend #4 had passed on free jazz to go to bed, bringing my friend-filled day to an early close. I hoofed it over to the bus stop, and despite getting temporarily lost on account of Israeli fear of street signs, made it safely home.

The Moses Montefiore Windmill, built in 1857 to grind flour in the first Jewish neighborhood outside the Old City.

A modern masterpiece. How tastes have changed.

Norther Exposure

I was sick for a few days this week and it took me a while to post this. Photos will be forthcoming.

On Friday the cousins and I drove up to the Golan for the weekend. A couple errands in Jerusalem and a pizza later, we were on our way. First we drove west, into the West Bank, and watched the markers noting we were at 0m, 150m, 300m below sea level in the Dead Sea basin. The barren rocky bluffs of the Judean Desert rose up on all sides, flecked with manicured Jewish towns and haphazard Bedouin encampments. We saw Jericho in the distance, road-side lawn ornament sales, and palm tree-filled desert oases. Before hitting the Jordan we turned north. Every so often we passed rows of green houses and date palm groves, small villages, some Jewish, some Arab, a rusted hull of a tank, left to the sun forty plus years ago, and the odd camel dawdling by the highway.

The farther north we traveled, the more lush the landscape became. From bleak white rocks to scrubland, to grasses grazing the most pitiful cows I’ve ever seen. The neat green rows under the tan, brush-covered mountains and the Arabs riding in the back of a flatbed reminded me of California. Some ways up, the highway runs just off the Jordan River, really just a trickle, and by extension the border with Jordan the country. Over fences and access roads were Jordanian towns and fields, just out of reach. A sign on the side of the highway had posted times for Shabbat services. We stopped at Mehola where one of my cousins-in-law is doing her national service, a community of both new suburban homes and older, smaller, weathered ones. Changing standards, I guess.

Crossing back into Israel proper, we continued north, across the Jordan (on such a small bridge, I didn’t even notice), and along the banks of the Galilee. We stopped to touch the water, and as we walked to the receding water’s edge, I couldn’t help but envision Jesus walking here along the seashell-covered sand. On the other side of the road were banana trees enveloped in netting, and above them the mountains from which Syrian tanks descended on Israel in 1967. Up the winding road into the mountains, and we arrived at Nov, a mostly agricultural moshav where friends of my cousins’ live.

We had Shabbat dinner with some of them in their gorgeous new house. I was trying to imagine what he must do to be able to afford to build a house like this, and then he dropped the bombshell: the plot cost 100,000 shekel. The existing homes like the one we were staying in cost 120,000 shekel. That’s about $35,000. I couldn’t believe that we were in a place where I could just about afford to buy a house on my savings and credit alone, no mortgages needed. The caveat being that in order to prevent people from just buying cheap vacation homes here, one would need to live there for a year before being able to buy a home. While many of these homes stood empty for a decade or more, being built to house some of the influx of Russian immigrants in the ’80s, this was now a very popular place to live and there was a wait list to get in. Our dinner host’s parents moved there and all their children stuck around to raise their own families there.

On Saturday afternoon, we took a walking tour of the town. We saw the rows of flowers and myrtles grown for sale domestically and for export to Europe and big pens of cows raised for the dairy, which gave the whole area its inescapable smell. The residents swear they’re used to it, but I don’t think I could ever. The plains stretched into the distance, tractors and big skies, in a panorama that could easily be mistaken for America’s breadbasket states. This is the agricultural heartland of Israel. It was really awesome to see people so attached to the land, so invested in working the land and tilling the soil. I’m a romantic at heart, and I find it affirming to interact with people so in touch with their environment.

After a very pleasant afternoon and evening, we drove back to Alon Shvut, stopping at the kosher McDonalds in Beit She’an. Micah and I just had to stop there, the American in us finding the concept unendingly funny, and I ate my “double royale” and “chips” with a smirk. And then the long drive home. The weekend was great, and Nov is a lovely place where I could own my own home, but with one catch. On our way out we stopped to say goodbye to our friends. They were on their way out to spend the night elsewhere, anywhere, because “you get trapped sometimes and don’t leave for months, and you need to get out.” Maybe I will just buy a vacation home.

Energia Ha-Atikah

After two days in Emek, I finally left the PT office. Micah picked me up on the way to a film shoot, and then we went to the Old City where he had meetings. Without anything specific to do, I got myself intentionally lost and spent the better part of the late afternoon and early evening wandering. I heard visitors speak German, British, Russian, various east Asian languages I couldn’t pinpoint. I walked above and below on the multi-level pathways, houses stacked on offices stacked on yeshivot, passing the same features over and over and trying to remember how I got there. A Greek Orthodox priest in full regalia, carrying a Greek flag, danced to an Israeli clarinetist in the square. Slender women in well-tailored clothes and hijabs hurried by. An overweight Hasid mumbled to himself and walked in circles. At a great observation point overlooking the Kotel plaza, a couple asked me to take a photo of them in front of the Dome of the Rock. The muezzin called out the adhan from the minarets on the Temple Mount, alerting the faithful it was time for prayer. The booming song echoed through the city. I explained to two young boys with blond payot and huge multi-color kipot that this is how the Muslims know it is time to daven, and one promptly excitedly explained it to his mother. A young Arab explained to his white boyfriend the nature of the conflict. The stones changed color as afternoon faded to twilight faded to dusk. I found myself following a Russian tour group through the Arab quarter to another entrance to the plaza. The soldier at the security check got mad at me for taking his photo. I walked toward the wall, all around me tourists taking photos, soldiers in formation, a man sitting on the ground, reading aloud softly from a handwritten sheet of notebook paper. I joined a minyan led by man with a stutter, in front of one with Tourrette’s. Along the wall, soldiers in uniform prayed next to men in black hats and coats and tourists in the white paper kipot those without a head-covering are requested to wear. I made my way back to the square where I was to meet Micah. Little girls played jump rope and argued in Hebrew about whose fault it was. I overheard a guy in a large white kippah on a skateboard tell a girl that Obama is up by 11 points in the polls. I found internet and saw that CNN.com had both candidates at 0%, this being about 8am PST. A girl walked over and asked to see poll results. She saw the senate count—more Democrats than Republicans in seats not up for grabs—and said, “There’s still hope,” I think implying she doesn’t have the same leanings I do. American yeshiva students passed by talking loudly. The Old City lives. I set my laptop to hibernate and go back to Alon Shvut after a long weekend.

Palestine is for lovers.

If you lived here you'd be home now.

Surely the man on the left is talking to God.

Hit'hadshut

Emek fest was awesome. Bands and music and food and arts and people and noise and energy. Emek Refaim, the street and its eponymous neighborhood, is full of hip restaurants, bookstores, coffee shops, and young people, and is a neighborhood that I could conceivably see myself in. I met up with one friend, found more (from high school, college, and two weeks ago), and made new ones.

Best thing about Israel: drinking in public!

The Effects of Busing

I think I like Tel Aviv. I had dinner last night at one of the few kosher restaurants in Tel Aviv—Tel Aviv being where the Jews live who want to get away from the Jews. It was a much more familiar experience: people walking around, waterfront views, stores and cars and lights. And the sherut drivers (a sherut is like a shared-ride taxi that essentially follows the bus routes but is faster) were surprisingly nice. One even drove me to the next sherut even though he was off duty because he saw me at the stop. At dinner with an old friend, and now mostly over my stomach-thing, we talked about Israeli culture and bad design.

Getting back to Jerusalem at 2 am posed a slight problem of where I would sleep. PresenTense, the magazine cum institute cum amorphous non-profit, for whom I’ve done some design work and am now assistant art director, has a new office in Emek Refaim in the southern part of Jerusalem, conveniently down the street from my friend. The high-concept office was intended to be a meeting place for young, active Jews, providing a workspace outside of coffee shops for writers, artists, entrepreneurs, etc., in addition to housing the global network’s physical presence. They also have a couple beds for PT staff who find themselves in the area and needing a place to sleep, and soon will have more to allow them to be a sort of hostel for wandering Jews. This being Sunday, people show up to work at 7:30 or 8:00 in the AM because this country hates weekends. I may go back to Alon Shvut today or stick around for the street festival tonight. Updates on that later. Now to work.

Hillel Goes to Yeshiva

The weekend wasn’t too bad. Aside from enduring stomach pains from my bullet-proof windowless-box trip to Be’er Sheva, it was fine. Friday night there was the periodic “ask the rabbis” event, and I was impressed by the truly profound, questioning nature of most of the questions. You’d think that kids who grew up in the Jewish day school system and opted to spend a year or two learning in Israel would have unwavering faith, and yet these kids were asking questions like what is the purpose of learning Torah when we could be helping people, how can God have commanded Jews to kill, and others that showed that these kids were actively struggling with various elements of traditional Judaism. I still don’t think it would have been a good fit for me, but it clearly shows that yeshiva is also for thinking, introspective people still searching for a workable worldview.

Also, at some point between me taking photos in the square around 2pm and leaving for Shabbat services around 4pm, my fleece sweatshirt disappeared. My guess is it’s in my brother’s place, but we didn’t find it, and a search of the square yielded three other sweatshirts/shirts, two pairs of shoes, and a baby stroller, leading me to think that had I left it there it would still be there, among the litter and filth covering most of the area. Six years, two continents and countless adventures were possible because of that fleece. RIP Black EMS Sweatshirt. Now off to Tel Aviv for dinner and the Israel Railways website is down. Figures.

Missed Connections

The Negev desert north of Be'er Sheva

I was so excited to find out that only the buses in the Territories are bullet-proof, and that I would be on non-bullet-proof buses with clear windows to Beit Shemesh. Or more specifically, the adjoining Ramat Beit Shemesh where my brother is in yeshiva. I watched the rocky soil of the Negev give way to farms and fields and forest. Eged’s website is, as expected, unhelpful, and I was stuck at a bus stop at a highway junction with no idea what to do. Bus drivers on the two possible lines I could take each said to take the other line, and the third listed on the website was not listed at the stop. Luckily, an American-born Israeli soldier overheard my phone call for help and told me he was going to the same place I was and I showed me the way. An intercity bus to Beit Shemesh and a local bus full of rowdy elementary school kids to Ramat Beit Shemesh later—something I’d never have been able to figure out on my own—I was at my destination, and met up with my brother and got some pizza. Oddly, the square looks dirtier than the clean streets of the settlement towns. Everything is under construction and covered in trash. My brother’s dorm/apartment is pretty crowded and seems like it was constructed with efficiency and expediency in mind in this rapidly growing region, rather than comfort and quality. I was reluctant to spend my weekend in isolation with 18-year-olds. We’ll see how it goes.

Most of Ramat Beit Shemesh looks like this, but with more trash.

Territorial Ruminations

Tonight/tomorrow is my Hebrew birthday, so the Be’er Sheva birthday dinner was on again. I prepared my stuff for a long weekend (Shabbat in Beit Shemesh, details to come), walked to the bus stop and got on the 3:00 bus to Be’er Sheva. Again, the bus’s cloudy bulletproof windows were nauseating, but I managed to sit by a relatively clear one. The bus shot nearly straight down through the West Bank, stopping at various yishuvim along the way. We stopped in Kiryat Arba by Hebron, a built-up, well-kept enclave in the middle of a barren, rocky desert, with trees, nice buildings, and lots of children. Army soldiers get on and off. The guy sitting next to me got off at Otniel. We stop at Haggai and Shim’a, turning off the highway, driving the winding roads up the mountains, entering through the electric gates by the security checkpoints. Inside are carefully paved streets, rows of houses, a cluster of trailers, and kids mulling about. Outside are crumbling cement walls littered with broken refuse. Those are Arab homes.

Who are these people who live such cloistered lives in towns enclosed by barb wire, surrounded by desert, among scattered Arab towns? Where do they work? Where do they buy their groceries? What spirit moves them to effect their destiny in the desert, create ex nihilo communities of civic-minded citizens, dedicated to the future of their children? It’s inspiring to see what can be achieved through sheer determination. It’s also striking how weirdly normal they all seem. I stop to wonder what will happen to these oases of civilization should a Palestinian state be founded here. A soldier playing loud Israeli pop in the row behind me interrupts my philosophizing.

I eventually made it to Ben Guiron Univeristy, no thanks to the bus driver who wouldn’t tell me which stop was mine, and we went out for an Indian birthday dinner. We walked through campus to the student center. It’s sleek and modern and collegiate. What a place that builds its dreams with stone and steel and constructs the future it sees for itself.

Yom Huledet M’azben

Today is my birthday. This is the first time I’ve spent my birthday in a foreign country and I wanted to do something fun. A friend from college with whom I share a birthday just started at Ben Gurion University in Be’er Sheva and I was hoping to go down there to have a celebratory dinner. Israel had other plans. I looked on the Eged website (Eged is Israel’s national bus company) to find a bus. I entered “Alon Shvut” to “Be’er Sheva” in the search window, but the website said that “there is no direct route to your destination.” I tried “Efrat” and again no dice. See, the English site will only tell you if there is a bus from the point of origin to the destination, like Jerusalem to Be’er Sheva, but won’t register any cities the bus stops at on the way. It also doesn’t tell you if there is a way to take one bus and connect to another bus. And the website has no maps of bus routes to figure that out for myself.

My cousin’s wife helped me look up the bus information on the Hebrew page, which lists connections and times, but by the time we finally figured out that there is one bus that stops by here on the way to Be’er Sheva, leaving Jerusalem at 3pm, it was 3:10, and not quite enough time to get my stuff together and make the bus. I tried the website for the relatively new train system, but found the map to be almost unusable, aside from the train not going quite where I needed it to. I could have taken a bus to Jerusalem and then a bus from there to Be’er Sheva, but with the intermittent rain, I wasn’t about to spend the next three hours in frustrated transit.

Putting the failures of Israeli transit system behind me, I went out to dinner with the cousins at a restaurant nestled in the forest with views of the valley below. We ate overlooking the lightening storm brewing in the distance, warmed by a log in the fireplace. It wasn’t so bad after all. Happy birthday to me.